The present invention relates to tournaments and more particularly to interactive tournaments where the participants play a poker-like game based on the action in one or more live events. U.S. Pat. No. 8,360,842 (“Poker-like games based on a live sporting event”, Simon) discloses a non-limiting example of a poker-like game based on the action in live sporting events. The present invention provides modified versions of poker-like games which are further embedded in a tournament structure designed specifically for those poker-like games. The prior art does not disclose any tournament structure that can accommodate poker-like games such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,360,842 or the modified poker-like games disclosed herein. The modified poker-like games described herein are also different from all other poker-like games in the prior art.
Traditional poker tournaments are very popular. There are high-profile tournaments like the World Poker Tour® and World Series of Poker that are extensively covered by the media, and countless lower-profile tournaments, for example, tournaments sponsored by colleges or held on cruise ships. Poker tournaments can be administered live (all participants are physically present at the same location) or online, and can feature just a few players at a single table, or tens of thousands of players playing at thousands of virtual tables. In every case though, the rules of the tournament are similar. Players start with equal stacks of chips (i.e., the buy in). The chips are only for playing, as they have no monetary value outside of the tournament. When players lose all their chips, they are eliminated from the tournament. The winner is the player that ends up with all the chips from the other players. Second place, third place, and so on, are determined by the order the players drop out.
Traditional poker tournaments are limited in the number of players who can directly play against each other. In general, the more players in a particular tournament, the longer a traditional poker tournament will last. It would not be possible, for example, to run a traditional poker tournament with one million players in a few hours, or even in a few days. With the present invention it is possible, for example, to play a poker-like tournament based on the action in a single football game, with millions of players, all in the three or four hours the football game lasts. With the present invention, very long tournaments are possible as well. For example, a tournament based on a season of (weekly) fantasy football contests could go on for months. The time frame of the present poker-like tournament invention closely mirrors the time frame of the sporting event or events it is based on, regardless of the number of players in the tournament.
In the context of poker-like tournaments based on live events, particularly a live sporting event, as described in the present invention, there is very little flexibility in the number of hands players play and when they are played, since the hands are linked to specific live events, or parts of live events. Traditional poker tournaments thus involve a large and unpredictable number of hands where the players do not all play the same number of hands, nor do players at different tables play their hands at the same times. Each table will play a different number of hands. Thus, the structure of a traditional poker tournament will not work for poker-like tournaments based on live events. A poker-like game based on a live sporting event must be played during that live sporting event since the values of the players' hands depends on the actions that occur during that live sporting event. In poker-like tournaments based on live sporting events, the live sporting events are specified ahead of time. Since the values of the hands will be based on those live sporting events, all the players' hands must be synchronized. In other words, all players (unless they have already been eliminated) play the same number of hands, and at the same times, as every other player. This feature cannot be accommodated in the traditional poker tournament format, so a new mechanism for running a tournament is needed.
Another feature of poker-like games based on live events of the present invention is that players can be allowed to choose their own hands, or parts of their hands, from a set of possible choices, instead of being dealt a hand randomly from a deck of cards. Thus the role of the dealer in the present invention is different than in traditional poker. Obviously, in traditional poker, if the players could choose their own hands they would all choose the best possible hand (e.g., a royal flush) and the game would be trivialized. However, in a poker-like game based on a live sporting event, it is not known in advance which hand will turn out to have the highest value, so allowing players to choose their own hand (or part of it) does not ruin the game. In fact, it can make the game more interesting, and adds to the level of skill needed to play the game well. Thus, a mechanism for providing a poker-like tournament where the players can select at least a portion of their hands, and then determining the value of those hands at the end of the live event, is also needed.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to have a method to operate a tournament based on poker-like games in such a way that the number of rounds (and/or hands played) in the tournament does not depend on the number of participants, and the hands can be synchronized between all participants. It would also be desirable to run a tournament based on poker-like games where the players are allowed to choose some or all of their own hands. For example, it would be desirable to have a method to run a tournament based on poker-like games that coincide with the sporting events featured in daily fantasy sports contests. In that case, the hands could be the fantasy teams the players draft for themselves.
As another example, it would be desirable to have a method to run a tournament based on poker-like games that coincide with a championship tournament, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament. In that case the hands would be the brackets filled out by the players. As another example, it would be desirable to have a method to run a tournament based on poker-like games that correspond to actions during a sporting event, such as the drives or sets of downs in a football game, and the players choose some or all of their hands from a special deck of cards. It would also be desirable to have a method to run a tournament based on poker-like games where players can initiate consecutive betting rounds after a waiting period. It would also be desirable to have a method to run a tournament based on poker-like games based on live sporting events where players can place bets (raises) during a betting round. It is believed that these modifications of the traditional poker tournament and poker-like game based on live sporting events results in a fundamentally new type of game and tournament structure.